Roald Dahl's
note: I am going to do this with mixed media. Mostly a narrated photo slideshow with some cartoons. I need to do something to get inspiration for doing cartoons. I thought of doing some morning glory seeds which are a legal hallucinogenic. However, I do not like the way hallucinogenics alter perception including social perception and at least I can hold down a part time job. With hallucinogenics, that would be out of the question. The best chemical inspiration is a cup of tea and to look at the artwork of others and to see what elements stand out or to remember elements learned from past trips. On one mushroom trip, I was conscientious of each little shard of light even in places I did not realize when sober. So many light reflections. A delicate tweaky feeling as one's CNS is being exquisitely fried. Another time I noticed how some things, or one thing in a picture is so much bigger than all the others. A big shape set against a bunch of little shapes.
I want my cartoons to have that crispy organic halloween time feeling and I do not have the graphic vocabulary to draw a lot of the things in this story. Or maybe I am too cartooned out and would like to do a mixed media project.
The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar
http://vimeo.com/3156489
intro
part 1
part 2
part 3
end credits
Meet my new friend, Vimeo:
http://vimeo.com/3044279
Henry Sugar was 41 years old and unmarried. He was also wealthy. His money was spent on eating at fine restaurants, and afternoons at the massage parlour. He drove a Ferrari car that must have cost him about the same as a country cottage. He had a luxury yacht. He was a regular of the card tables in Monaco.
He had a personal motto: It is better to incur a mild rebuke than to perform an onerous task. His friends thought this was hilarious.
Men like Henry are to be found drifting like seaweed all over the World. They can be seen especially in London, New York, Cannes and St Tropez. They are not particularly bad men. But they are not good men either.
One day, he was at a friend's house. It was Henry's turn to sit out as he was the fifth guest at an occasion where the 4 person card game canasta was being played.
It was raining outside, and he was in the library. He usually found books boring but one book seemed to leap out at him from the shelves.
IMRAT KHAN THE MAN WHO COULD SEE WITHOUT HIS EYES
I am Dr. John Cartwright. I am working at a hospital in Bombay India. It is 1934. A patient walks in. He says that he can see without his eyes. Even after blindfolded he could still see without his eyes.
How many fingers am I holding up?
Three.
There was a stage show in which he was the final act. He dazzled all with throwing knives at his assistant on a spinning wheel while he was blindfolded.
After the show, I went to visit him backstage.
I told him that the show was awesome and I said to his assistant that he was very good. He spoke Hindi to his assistant as the assistant did not speak any English.
I asked him to tell me about himself.
When I was young, a magician came to my village. He was a good magician who did things like linking rings and pulling a rabbit out of a hat. He sent me to another magician. He was a true yogi who said that most people can not concentrate on something for more than a few seconds before other thoughts start emerging like what they saw in their dreams over the last couple of days. However, once someone can concentrate on something for a few minutes, they can see without using their eyes. The eyes are just instruments to achieve something that is an innate part of the physiology.
A person rises out of the top of themselves to achieve something called second sight.
Henry put down the book and started meditating. He stared into a candle and tried to hold the image of something in his mind, his own face. At first, he was able to concentrate on his face for a few seconds. However, over the course of three years of practice, he was able to concentrate on something for more than three minutes without thinking of something else.
Over time, he was able to control this and to be able to see things with his eyes closed. This is often referred to as second sight when a person emerges from the top of their head and sees the room he is happening to be in at the moment. He was able to see the other side of playing cards explaining that cards and paper is thin and one can somehow see the other side.
He went to a fancy casino. There was a big crowd here tonight. Well-fed women stood around the roulette wheel like plump hens around a feeding hopper. Jewels and gold were dripping over their bosoms and from their wrists. Many of them had blue hair. The men were in dinner jackets and there wasn't a tall one among them. Why, Henry wondered did this particular kind of rich man always have short legs? Their legs seemed to stop at the knees with no thighs above.
Many of them had bellies coming out a long way, and crimson faces and cigars between their lips. Their eyes glittered with greed.
All this Henry noticed. It was the first time in his life that he had looked with distaste upon this type of wealthy gambling-casino person. Up until now, he had always regarded them as companions as members of the same group and class as himself. Tonight they seemed vulgar.
Could it be, he wondered, that the yoga powers he had acquired over the last three years had altered him just a little bit?
The first night, he won a lot of money, and he had a suitcase. When he awoke, for some reason, he had a feeling of revulsion towards the money. He threw all of it, the suitcase of money down his balcony onto the streets below.
A Police Officer saw that and said, "What the hell are you doing?!" Henry explained that he wanted to be a philanthropist. He wanted to donated to charity. The Police Officer was angry, "If you truly want to do good with the money, you should donate it to a charity like an orphanage. When I see people throwing money away in the streets it makes me mad."
"An orphanage?" Henry said.
"Yes, an orphanage. I should know what it's like. I was brought up in one!"
Henry didn't move. The Policeman's words, and more especially the geuine fury with which they had been spoken, smacked our hero right between the eyes.
Henry thought of a few points.
One, I can make a lot of money.
Two, I must not go to any casino more than once every twelve months.
Three, not too much money from any one casino in any one night. Limit twenty thousand dollars.
Four, twenty thousand times 365 nights equals seven million, three hundred thousand dollars.
Five, No more than two nights in any one city. London. Monte Carlo. Las Vegas. Manila. Bangkok. Freeport. Grand Cayman. Nassau.
Henry travelled with an accountant named John Winston.
For seven years, all went well. Then one day, there was a spot of trouble. Although Henry was always careful not to win too much money, there is a grapevine among casino owners and word always got out in the end. One week, Henry had won a hundred thousand dollars each from three Las Vegas casinos owned by the same mob. One day, there was a knock on his door. The deskclerk said that there were two large men downstairs and he did not give Henry much for his odds of survival if he were to leave. Henry said, "I will give you a thousand dollars if you tell me how to leave." The bellhop said, "Wear my uniform and tie me up. I will say that you robbed me at gunpoint."
Downstairs, two thugs were watching the lobby. But they hardly noticed the man wearing the bell hop's uniform.
Henry realized that he needed to disguise himself. He hired a makeup artist who worked in Hollywood named Max Engelman and paid him twice what the film companies were paying him.
A year after, he went back into the same Las Vegas and won $80,000 from them disguised as an elderly Brazilian diplomat. The casino never knew what hit them.
Henry Sugar died last year in 1964, at the age of sixty three. He had been at this for about twenty years. He donated a total of $144 million to orphanages.
Based on a true story.
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text to be continued....
